Team writing script for musical has long history of success
Show based on Foreigner songs to launch in Calgary and Edmonton next summer
For British writer Dick Clement and his longtime writing partner Ian La Frenais, creating the book for Jukebox Hero, a musical featuring the songs of Foreigner, was just a neighbourly thing to do.
Calgary theatrical promoter Jeff Parry, Foreigner’s manager Phil Carson, and Foreigner’s founding member Mick Jones are teaming up to create a Mamma Mia! style musical to launch in Calgary and Edmonton in August 2018.
“Ian is a great friend of Mick Jones and Phil Carson lives just a few doors up from me in Los Angeles. These are the kind of connections that make a venture like Jukebox Hero possible,” says Clement, who with La Frenais wrote the screenplays for such films as The Commitments, Across the Universe, Flushed Away and The Bank Job and such iconic British TV series as Lovejoy, The Likely Lads, Porridge, The Two Ronnies and Thick as Thieves.
Clement says he and La Frenais didn’t start to write with Foreigner’s songs, but rather hammered out “a story that would work on the stage and be pertinent and relevant.
“What we settled on was the plight of a town that has lost its main industry and which needs the help of its most famous son, a rock star, to come back and do a concert that will raise money for all the people who will be unemployed.
“We felt that Foreigner’s It Feels Like the First Time could open the show if we just changed a few of the lyrics. Instead of a guy who’s lost his love, it’s a whole town that has lost hope.
“We knew we had to end the first act with I Want to Know What Love Is and then everything seemed to fall into place.”
Clement says he and La Frenais used a similar approach to create Jukebox Hero as they did to write the screenplay for the Beatles film Across the Universe.
“Ian and I drove all around Los Angeles listening to Beatles songs and tossing around ideas of how they could be staged in a film. When we listened to Happiness is a Warm Gun, we both agreed it would be a great song for guys recovering in a veterans’ hospital, that kind of thing.”
Clement admits he and La Frenais’ biggest worry was that “Mick wouldn’t like what we’d done with his music.
“We’d have really been worried if he was worried that the story we had didn’t work for his music, but the reaction we got from him when he read the script was really supportive.
“He said the story gave new life and meaning to his music and lyrics.”
The first time Clement and La Frenais collaborated on a stage musical was back in the early 1970s when they turned the Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall play, Billy Liar, into a musical called Billy starring a young Michael Crawford.
“Ian and I are actually trying to revive Billy. It never made it to Broadway in its first incarnation and we think it could transfer to Broadway this time if it is received with as much acclaim as it was the first time around.”
Clement says before they can approach producers, they have to find “a young star who is funny and can dance, sing, act and put bums in seats, and that’s not as easy as it sounds.”
One of the duo’s biggest TV successes was the 1974 sitcom Porridge about a pair of petty criminals serving time.
They revived the concept and the first new episode of Porridge aired earlier this month in England.
“We’ve updated it so that now the grandson of the original character is in jail for an internet crime.”
Clement and La Frenais have been writing together for 55 years, living close to each other in the same Los Angeles neighbourhood.
“Ian lives two streets away from me. He arrives at 9:30 every morning and we go to work.
“It’s a routine we never intend to break.”
We knew we had to end the first act with I Want to Know What Love Is and then everything seemed to fall into place.